The Politics of Emotions: David Low as Artist-Expert & Objective-Artist

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This paper explores the ways emotion and politics intersect through the work of cartoonist David Low. It investigates how emotions function both as a tool for influencing public political awareness and as a means of constructing journalistic authority. Low positioned himself as an ‘artist-expert,’ claiming an ability to interpret politics with insight that transcend the written word, and as ‘objective-artist,’ whose clarity of vision stood in contrast to his emotional adversaries. This paper situates Low and his cartoons within broader networks of political meaning-making, where the emotional plays a key role in interpretation and in constructing categories of legitimacy.